


Woven Walls

by hauntedjaeger (saellys)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Creative Solutions for Living With a Man Who Can Never Show His Face, Domestic, Emotional Labor, Established Relationship, F/F, F/M, Kid Fic, Multi, Not Canon Compliant, POV Bisexual Character, Polyamory, Saccharine All the Way Down, Worldbuilding, mention of child death, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:01:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21749458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger
Summary: Cara has never been a peacemaker, not the real kind. It doesn’t come easy, but they’re teaching her. “Can I say, as someone who may be in a draw for most normal childhood, that there’s probably a balance we can strike between modernizing parts of Sorgan, and keeping it… Sorgan?”Omera takes a deep breath and lets it out before answering. “The people here may be too kind to say it, but none of them will trust an offworlder to find that balance.” Cara suspects she’s projecting.“Then tell me when I start to overstep,” he says.“Will you listen?” Omera challenges.“I listen.”“Come back to bed.”He listens.
Relationships: Cara Dune/The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)/Omera (Star Wars)
Comments: 36
Kudos: 186





	Woven Walls

“I don’t understand it,” he says into the dark. It’s late, and it would be dark even without the blackout tarp that clings inside the high curved walls of Omera’s house. 

(Cara ribbed him mercilessly about the tarp. He didn’t just come back with hopes, with his heart in his hands; he had _plans.)_

“Truly?” Omera says. “After seeing the lengths you go to for your son? It makes sense to me.” 

“They know what I am.” 

“A Mandalorian, and a foundling, which tells them the Mandalorians care about children, which puts you one up on the rest of the galaxy.” 

“I mean what I’ve done since I was a foundling.” 

“Like save the whole village?” Cara offers. 

“That was mostly you.” 

How generous. “Sure, but they already know I’m awful with kids.” 

“No you’re not.” 

“I get it,” Cara sidesteps. “You think the armor should be automatically intimidating, but you’re too late, Mando. Everybody has seen past the scary shell, not literally, to the soft and tender insides.” She goes to prod his gut. He anticipates this and clenches up, and her fingers don’t find anything soft. 

“If it bothers you,” Omera soothes, “I can tell the others not to ask you to watch the kids again.” 

“It doesn’t bother me. I just don’t understand it.” 

Cara shrugs, jarring his shoulder too. “Kids like shiny things. It’s why they follow you around.” 

Winta and the child snore from the little loft Cara built for them because Winta doesn’t like the dark, and the Mandalorian stays silent. 

* * *

The next night, Cara can hear the smile in Omera’s voice when she says, “So. Bini’s a handful.” 

“He needs a place to put that energy,” he says. “He’s smart. Knows his primes. When I tried to quiz him on astronavigation he wandered off to poke things with sticks.” 

“None of the kids have been taught anything about astronavigation,” Omera says. 

“You’re serious. Not even the basics?” 

“Math, sure. They have self-instructor datapads. But when will they need to know how to plot a jump?” 

“When a freighter comes through, looking for new crewmembers.” 

“Opportunities like that don’t land on Sorgan,” Omera says. “These kids are going to inherit ponds and plots that their parents inherited from their parents before them.” 

“Most folks calculate their jumps with a droid anyway,” Cara chimes in. 

“Yeah, not me,” he says. After a minute he asks, “How come none of them are younger than Winta?” 

Omera is very still. “A couple years back there was a bad round of sistil. We lost the youngest ones. Nobody’s really had the heart to have more since.” 

Gently, Cara brushes her hand over Omera’s bare shoulder. “Did you…” 

“No. Winta’s my only. And her father was already gone by then. Still, it was a hard season for everyone.” 

He’s sitting up between them now. “You don’t have the sistil vaccine here.” 

“What do you expect? We’re lucky to have bacta. The Old Republic, the Empire, and the New Republic all overlooked this place, and that’s to the good. Sorgan hasn’t been colonized since the first humans landed. It’s how we’ve kept peace.”

He speaks like he sounds through the helmet, scrubbed of feeling. “Peace and dead kids.” 

“From disease, not from war,” Omera shoots back. She has a sharp edge in her voice, but she doesn’t raise it; the tarp blocks light, not sound, and this is not something the rest of the village needs to hear. “And we haven’t orphaned any.” 

Cara sucks a breath through her teeth. The quiet afterward is heavy. The Mandalorian says, “I’m going for a walk.” 

Omera stays silent as he gets out of bed and gets his things. Once she’s sure he has his helmet on and can see her, Cara gives him a sarcastic thumbs-up, and a wave. 

The moment the outer layer of tarp seals behind him, Omera turns on a glowlamp. Cara winces in the brightness. 

“He thinks he’s so enlightened,” Omera hisses. She climbs over Cara and, unfortunately, wraps a blanket around herself. Cara sits up, and keeps her eyes down. “I have an education,” Omera goes on. “I’ve been places, I’ve seen things, and I _know_ Sorgan. He’s judging it for the same qualities that made him choose it in the first place.” 

“He chose it when he was on the run,” Cara reminds her. “Then he chose to come back for you.” 

Omera ignores her and starts to pace. “No warlords. No feudalism. No spice. Just some drunk bandits, and we handled them easy enough.” 

Easy, sure. “He’s still trying to find his footing here,” she says. “It’s not an easy thing to give up fighting.” 

Cara found her place quick enough. She lifts, she hauls, she chops, she builds. Between patching roofs and putting Winta’s loft together, she’s nearly mastered the Sorgan style of architecture, the domes and spindles constructed like a krill basket. 

The Mandalorian has been helping her ever since he finished with putting up perimeter sensors, burying a weapons cache at the edge of the woods, and lightproofing the house. He has plenty of transferable skills, and he’s competent like he’s competent at everything, but it’s not quite a fit. 

“Is it a backwater?” Omera demands. “Of course it’s a backwater. Is it paradise? No. Is there a price to pay for the quiet? Yes, always. Life is hard everywhere. It’s easier here than most places.” 

Cara knows. Moreover, life here is _rewarding,_ in both the short and long term. She works with her hands each day and she sees the results, tangible, and there to benefit everyone. Life here is worth something. Worth defending. Worth maintaining. “If he got ahold of some real medicine though, would you partake?” 

“Of course!” Omera’s hair swings at her back as she turns on Cara. “I’m not a fool.” 

“Didn’t call you a fool,” Cara says, raising her hands. This is probably the wrong time to tell her how much she loves it when Omera gets passionate about a thing. She rarely sees it in the light anymore. 

He steps through the tarp then, and abruptly backs out--must still have his night vision on. “Could you switch that off, please?” 

Omera returns to the bed and sits next to Cara in a huff, and turns the light off. “Done.” 

Cara hears him come back in and sigh as he takes off the helmet. The things he says when he gets back from a walk are not the last words on the matter--never, not where Omera is concerned--but they are the most important words he can gather in the quiet and the solitude. “You made the right choice for yourself and Winta, being here,” he says. “Everyone who’s here made the right choice.” 

“So did you,” Omera tells him. He lets that hang between them without response. 

Cara has never been a peacemaker, not the real kind. It doesn’t come easy, but they’re teaching her. “Can I say, as someone who may be in a draw for most normal childhood, that there’s probably a balance we can strike between modernizing parts of Sorgan, and keeping it… Sorgan?” 

Omera takes a deep breath and lets it out before answering. “The people here may be too kind to say it, but none of them will trust an offworlder to find that balance.” Cara suspects she’s projecting. 

“Then tell me when I start to overstep,” he says. 

“Will you listen?” Omera challenges. 

“I listen.” 

“Come back to bed.” 

He listens. 

* * *

The next day Cara goes into the woods first thing with the cart and an axe, and doesn’t come back until nearly sundown. “Hey there,” Omera says as they cross paths near the cookfires, her eyes twinkling. “Would have liked to see all that chopping.” 

“You know it,” Cara replies, flexing for her. 

She finds the Mandalorian and most of the kids sitting on the ground near Omera’s house, working on some kind of fizzy experiment. Surplus fermenting supplies, probably. She rolls seven round stumps and one wide log off the cart. 

“Thank you,” he tells her, and turns to the kids as they scramble to seat themselves on the stumps. “Does anyone have questions for Cara while she’s here?” 

Indar raises her hand. “How are you so strong?” 

“Uhh.” She glances at the Mandalorian, but he's leaning toward her in a posture of attentiveness, just like the kids. “Well. When I was little, my ma accidentally set the artificial gravity on our freighter to one-point-two-five times human baseline. When she realized it wasn’t hurting anybody, she left it that way. Me and my sisters grew up with what the doctors call an _excessively fortified musculoskeletal system.”_

“Wizard,” breathes Indar. 

“She built my loft,” Winta reminds everyone. 

“Did you beat up the Mandalorian for real?” says Bini. 

She pulls the cart onward. “It was a tie. Ties are good--ties make friends.” 

“Really good friends,” says Winta. “She lives in my house!” 

Cara finds an open spot between two ponds that should be big enough. 

“What are you building?” the kids call. 

“It’s a secret!” Cara shouts back, because the whole village loves nothing more than speculation. She drives support struts into the soft soil until Omera calls her to dinner. 

* * *

Omera is painfully transparent, pouring her own spotchka into Cara’s cup. “What are you building, Cara?” she asks as she hands her the double portion, tapped from one of the oldest vats this time--maybe pre-Yavin. Cara hides her smile behind the rim of the cup, and says nothing. 

Once they’re inside for the night, the Mandalorian takes off his gloves and presses his thumbs into the worst of the soreness between her shoulders. “In a draw for most normal childhood, huh?” 

What’s normal, anyway? No one stuck a helmet on her head in adolescence, or trained her to be a faceless and brutally efficient war machine. “A little extra gravity never hurt anyone,” Cara sighs. “You got a mineral surveyor on your ship?” 

“I do.” Mandalorians: always looking for something to smelt. 

“Mind if I use it?” 

“I don’t.” The pain fades as her muscles relax. Omera is suspiciously quiet. “So are you exactly one-point-two-five times stronger than human baseline?” 

“One-point-five. The other point-two-five is from hard work and lots of protein.” 

His mouth grazes the skin behind her ear, and he keeps his pressure steady. “What are you building?” 

Cara feels a pang of guilt, because in here they are not supposed to have secrets. This one, though, she will keep a bit longer. She starts to tell him so, but Omera kisses her sweetly. And then she moves lower, and gets Cara’s leggings down. 

“Oh,” Cara laughs, “interrogation methods.” 

“If that does it for you,” he says, moving his hands to her arms and pulling her back against him. 

Between Cara’s legs, Omera moves her clever quick tongue, and Cara turns her smile toward the Mandalorian’s neck, lest she open her mouth and tell them everything. These are nicer methods than she was trained to withstand. 

Omera asks it one more time when Cara is in their bed, warm and satisfied, every muscle slack and feeling no pain. “What are you building?” she says in her softest voice. 

Cara kisses her, and tastes herself. 

“It’s a secret,” she says. 

* * *

She gets the deck and floorboards down the next day. “Will you help me weave the walls tomorrow?” she asks Omera over dinner on the porch. 

Omera considers the platform. “It’s big. We might run out of osiers. But I’ll help.” 

“Thanks.” Omera is quiet, solemn. Something happened today when Cara’s back was turned. 

Winta comes running. “Mama! I sighted the galactic Core!” 

The Mandalorian follows in her wake, carrying the runt, an empty food basket, and a case that must hold some kind of optical gear. The firelight picks out other small shapes going home after the night’s excursion. 

“Did you see Coruscant?” Omera asks. 

“No, it was just a big bright blob. Do they call it Coruscant because it’s in the Core?” 

“Absolutely,” says Cara. “Same goes for Core-ellia, and Core-ulag. Did you know Caamas used to be called Cormas, and Kuat was once Corat?” 

“Don’t listen to Cara,” says the Mandalorian, softly, because his kid’s asleep in the crook of his arm. 

“Why not?” she protests as he climbs one-handed up to the loft. “I guarantee I’ve been on more Core worlds than you, Rim-rat.” 

“Core-a!” Winta says, delighted. Cara tousles her hair. 

He comes back down, and Omera nudges Winta toward the ladder. “Food’s inside,” she tells him, a little clipped. 

“Thank you.” He leans by the doorway, and waits until Omera is up in the loft tucking Winta in. “You’re not moving out into that thing, are you?” he asks Cara. 

“After last night? Nope.” She folds her hands behind her head and tilts her chair against the wall. 

“Okay. Good.” His helmet pans away from her--and then snaps back. “You’re not kicking _me_ out, are you?” 

“Mando.” This is apparently a genuine concern, so she works hard to keep her face neutral. “If you peeved me off bad enough for me to kick you out, and risk Omera gutting me with a krill knife, would I build you a house?” 

He dips his head. “Probably not,” he says. 

“Probably not,” she agrees, and he goes inside to eat. 

* * *

They don’t run out of osiers the next day, and the walls grow one row at a time. “The windows should start here,” Cara says when they’ve woven the slats as high as her calf. 

Omera nods, and sits down to shape a circle out of a thick shoot. She’s got hide gloves for this work; the osiers are supple from soaking in an unseeded pond, but they’ll slice the skin if handled wrong. The reed cuttings they use to secure the rows every meter will dry as tough as durasteel, and twice as flexible in the wind. “What are we building?” Omera asks without conviction. 

“Secret.” Cara bends to kiss the top of her head, and then gets on a stool to lash the wall’s vertical supports together into the spindle roof. The overhead stretch feels nice, though her neck will hate her later. 

She catches Omera looking toward the ring of stumps where the Mandalorian sits with the kids. He spends an hour a day with them now, and the kids choose which hour, or their parents send them when they need a break. He’s got three identical camtonos on the ground and the kids are hoisting them in turn until the last one, which none of them can lift. It’s either a weird workout or a demonstration of relative gravity. 

Omera’s eyes are so big and sad, Cara is tempted to ask if she’s been getting pointers from the kid. “Haven’t seen him put a blaster in any of their hands,” she comments instead. 

“He wouldn’t,” Omera says. “What did you learn as a kid, on your freighter?”

“How to keep a ship running, more or less. Ma cut a lot of corners, but it was always spaceworthy. We got time in the cockpit--I don’t have much of a pilot’s spark. A little about every planet we saw, even if it was only the capitol and major exports. How to scrape a meal together from whatever was in the cooling unit. How to lie to customs agents.” 

“Smugglers?” 

“Only when the money was better than going legit. My parents didn’t get too deep in, for our sake I guess. The family was never in debt, never beholden. What did you learn here, as a kid?” 

“Chemistry, for the brewing,” Omera says. “How to turn the pondwater alkaline, fix nitrogen in the soil, make dyes lightfast. Enough history to understand there was a war going on, far away. Basic physical medicine for humanoids. Cooking, weaving. Which parts of a grinjer you can boil down, and which are toxic.” 

Fine, Omera wins for most normal childhood. “Very practical.” 

“On Sorgan they say a child has to hold an idea in the hand before they can hold it in the mind.” 

Cara likes that. “Have you shared that with him?” 

“Something tells me the Mandalorians have a similar notion.” 

As they watch, Sialin strains and strains at the last camtono, her face flushing dark from the effort, until it suddenly pops up and she falls back with a cry. The camtono hangs in the air for a few more seconds, then settles back onto the grass. 

Omera is on her feet at once, and Trula rushes over to her daughter. Sialin gets back up, laughing. “Did you do that?” she says to the little green runt, whose ears start to droop. 

The Mandalorian picks up his kid and waves the others off. He moves carefully but quickly to the loft. When he comes back down, his head is low, and he keeps it angled away from Cara’s and Omera’s gazes. He goes into the house. 

Omera sets down the window frame and gets up--and then hesitates, looking back at Cara. “Yeah, go,” Cara tells her, and Omera drops the gloves and runs to the house. They would probably say the same things; in the moment, the words will be worth more from Omera than from Cara. 

Caben and Trula wander over. They pick up where Omera left off. Caben brought his own gloves. “How’s Sialin?” Cara asks. 

“She’s fine,” says Trula. She is, in fact, back to chasing frogs with Winta. “Will you tell him she’s fine?” 

“I will.” 

“We have nothing against the Jedi,” Caben says, failing to sound casual. “A few Force-users helped establish the spotchka trade here on Sorgan a long time ago. We hold them in high regard.” 

Cara nods. This is awkward work, and she’s still trying to understand what she saw. “Okay.” 

“No one in the village wants him and the child to leave,” Trula says. 

Cara stops working. “Kriff.” She drops down from the stool, shaking the floorboards, and strides out of the half-finished structure. 

“Coming in,” she says softly in the threshold between the two layers of blackout tarp. 

No answer, but they’re not telling her to wait, or saying _kark off Dune, we’re busy_ , so in she goes. The lights are off. Cara feels her away to the bed. “Hey,” she says when she finds Omera sitting up, and then finds him pressed close to Omera. His armor is off: a surprise, and a good sign. 

“You can relax. I’m not leaving.” His voice sounds rough. 

_Again_. Not leaving again. If one lousy bounty hunter who didn’t check their six was enough to send him running last time, what will this do? “No one’s upset,” she tells him. “Sialin’s fine. Her mom came over to reassure me, which is weird because I had nothing to do with it, but apparently no one on Sorgan is in the business of selling Force-sensitives out to whoever is buying.” 

“Dune.” 

“I’ve got a friend of a friend who could drop by and meet the kid, give some advice. I don’t know how young they used to start training, but--” 

“Cara.” 

“Would you put your helmet on? I need the light.” She needs to see them. She needs them to see her more. 

“Bad dream, Dune?” They have held her through a few of those. He can only joke about it now because she didn’t wake up screaming. 

“Put it on or so help me--” 

“It’s on.” 

She smacks the nearest glowlamp until it lights up. He’s only wearing the helmet and his skivs, which never fails to amuse Cara: a mostly naked guy in a shiny hat. Not funny right now though. Omera sits with her legs folded up in his lap, her face turned against his shoulder, away from the light. 

Cara points right at his mug. “You came back here expecting it to be nothing but cherishing each other in the dark, and a rustic happy ending,” she accuses. 

“‘Settle down with that beautiful young widow and raise your kid sitting here, sipping spotchka’?” Despite the helmet, he does a fair impression of her speech patterns. 

“Yeah, I can romanticize things too, okay? And if you two met ten or fifteen years ago, that’s how it probably would have gone. But you’ve got the kid, and Omera has Winta, and you’re not putting two people together, you’re putting two families together. And you’ve both worked so hard to defend your ways of life that you can’t stop, even when they’re not being attacked. 

“And you.” Omera turns her face toward Cara. There are tears in her eyes, and as much as Cara would like to gently dry them, she can’t do that before she gets this out. “You thought this place, as-is, would be enough. You thought anyone could do what you did and sacrifice whatever they had to be here. But we can all see that isn’t true. And you’re still taking it personally.” 

Omera gapes at her. After a moment she nods. “She read us,” says the Mandalorian. 

“Like it was written on your visor,” Omera replies, lifting one corner of her mouth. To Cara she says, “We’re putting three families together.” 

“I guess,” Cara admits. Maybe she’s defending her way of life right now. She scuffs the floorboard with her boot. “Don’t see my sisters anywhere, though.” 

“That would be weird,” says the Mandalorian. “Did you say your piece?” 

“Yeah.” Emotional intelligence is a sprint, not a marathon. She’s almost as tired as the kid now. 

“Can we…” He gestures from the helmet to the light. 

Cara hits the glowlamp again, and either breaks it or turns it off. 

“I’m not leaving,” he repeats. “Come here.” 

Cara does. 

* * *

The next day she gets the roof panels up on top of the walls Caben and Trula finished, and the day after, she takes the _Razor Crest_ ’s mineral surveyor and a pickaxe and the cart out into the woods, and she comes back with a roughly rectangular slab of dark stone that could be cut down and chipped into wicked spear points or knives if she wanted. She leaves it whole, and props it against the curved wall in the new building, and the woven osiers bend further from the weight, but it holds together the way it’s meant to. The day after, she cuts low shelves that follow the inside curve. 

The day after that, it pours down rain. Cara wakes to the sound of it against their roof panels, and on the tarp when it blows through the woven walls. It’s a frustration and a relief to delay finishing the new place. Nobody’s getting anything done today. 

One of the lights on the Mandalorian’s vambrace blinks on, to let her know he’s up and dressed. “I’ve got the kids. Stay in.” 

“Good man,” Cara says. 

And when Omera wakes up, she and Cara have a nice, lazy, warm morning. It strikes Cara that she ought to check the roof of the new building. She kisses Omera one more time, gets dressed, and pulls a poncho over her head. Once outside she pulls up the hood against raindrops so big that they hit like hail. She squints toward the thing she’s built. 

There’s a light on inside. 

Carefully, Cara approaches. The soft turf tries to steal her boots; she has to ease them out with every step. She can see silhouettes through the slats, and a flickering image near the back, where she leaned the slate. 

She ducks through the doorway, and the Mandalorian turns off the holoprojector. The kids turn as one to look at her. The runt is snug between Winta and Sialin, with a cup of something steaming in his tiny hands. Everybody’s ponchos hang by the door on the pegs she wedged between the slats. And the roof isn't leaking. 

“I’m sorry,” says the Mandalorian. “This was the only place big enough to keep everyone out of the rain.” 

“No,” Cara says, struggling to get the word past her grin. “That’s why I built it.” 

Winta is the first to run straight into Cara’s gut and wrap both arms as far around her as she can. “Thank you, thank you!” Indar joins her, a little more timidly. Cara awkwardly pats their shoulders. The others stay put, but they’re a chorus echoing Winta. 

The Mandalorian reaches toward his helmet, and then stops, drops his hand. Cara stares. If he wasn’t spending six or eight hours with it off every night in their presence, having grown-up conversations and getting overwhelmed, and leaving and coming back, he’d never slip like that. For a second, part of him forgot he was wearing it. 

“Okay,” says the Mandalorian, and he is still and his voice is quiet as ever, but the kids turn at once and settle. They’re attentive because they want to be there, because he has something different for them every day, and because his regard is worth something. “Let’s review. What are the elements of a successful revolution?” 

“Clearly stated goals,” says Bini. He recites the words by rote, but with conviction. 

“An organized populace,” chirps Sialin. 

“That’s us!” Bini says. 

“A plan to protect the innocents from necessary violence.” Winta delivers this with as much dignity and solemnity as her mother. 

All of a sudden Cara gets something in her eye. 

“That’s us, too,” says Indar. 

Every single one of them, and this whole soggy planet. Can someone know they’re innocent and still _be_ innocent? Cara never bothered to study philosophy, but maybe here, just now, they are answering that. 

The rain will fix her eye. She turns, gives the Mandalorian a wave over her shoulder, and goes home. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading this extremely self-indulgent thing. I'm @hauntedfalcon on Tumblr.


End file.
